“A marvel of good ol’ American can do.”
It was Werner Von Braun, who was probably an ex Nazi.
Not probably,,,he WAS a NAZI, and proud of it. As far as I know, he never recanted NAZI’ism. He was a Sturmbannfuhrer (major) of the SS, and personally picked slave workers from Buchenwald to work on the V-2 program. French prisoners have said he ordered beatings of the workers and enjoyed watching the beatings. Everything he did in the field of rocketry was built on the work of Robert Goddard, an American. Sick and tired of that smirking, sneering, NAZI piece of crap getting all the credit for the US space program. Goddard is the father of our space program, not von Braun.
Get used to it. Wernher von Braun put the first man on the moon and not Goddard. Just compare the evolution of both rocket programs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Goddard#Roswell.2C_New_Mexico
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aggregate_%28rocket_family%29
“Explorer 1” was put into space on a rocket inherited with V2.